An open letter by the Reverend Philip Foster to Roger Harrabin.

Today’s article is an open letter from the Reverend Philip Foster, MA to Roger Harrabin (above) the BBC’s Environment Analyst. The letter is in response to the programme, “Uncertain Future” broadcast on BBC Radio Four between 9:00 and 9:30 AM and be to be repeated this evening between 9:30 and 10:00 PM. Mr. Harrabin asked whether the arguments surrounding climate change can ever be won. In the second episode to be twice broadcast on 6th September 2010 at the same times, Mr. Harribin will ask how climate policy decisions can be taken amid scientific uncertainty.
Dear Roger,
I am listening with interest to your programmes on ‘climate change’.
So far I am somewhat disappointed. You suggest that the IPCC is in some sense a scientific body. This is not correct: it was set up to PROVE AGW. That eliminates it from being considered scientific.
Science is not about proving a hypothesis (which AGW remains, if that), but about *testing* a hypothesis: whether it is true or false.
The IPCC was never interested in doing that. From the outset any attempts by scientists to suggest looking for other causes of climate variability were ignored.
For example when Knud Lassen and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish Space Research Institute (later renamed Danish National Space Centre) suggested, in their role as official delegates to the IPCC from Denmark (no ‘wicked’ oil money there!!), that one of the important areas of research that the IPCC should encourage should be solar effects on climate, the idea was dismissed out of hand. Right from the start this demonstrated that the IPCC worked to a specific unscientific agenda: they were already assuming that human emissions were the cause of climate change without any evidence.
And the Danes have subsequently been proved correct.
You made the statement that AGW is “a science based risk”.
Sorry but this is not true. It is “a MODEL based risk”.
Models are not and never will be science. Some simple models are useful tools, but climate models are, currently, a waste of time and money. You realise that these models do not use the physics of climate to make predictions? (In fact they merely make projections – quite another matter). Intriguingly they are essentially two dimensional, treating the earth as a disc not a sphere. They cannot manage anything much except horizontal air movements – which is why they cannot begin the model cloud behaviour – they are, ironically, FLAT EARTH models.
If they could really model our climate then with current computing power it would take such a computer model 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to predict the next ten years – and anyway no ones knows all the physics in the first place. Modelling the British economy is a doddle by comparison – and that cannot be done either.
Yours,
Philip.